OS:Windows 8 Pro x64 (testing to see if I keep it or go back to Windows 7)

Posted 08 November 2012 - 14:49

It looks like the effort that Peter Molyneux and 22 Cans has put in building an aura of intrigue around their experimental mobile game Curiosity has paid off.

In a matter of hours since the game's launch, hundreds of thousands of players have already downloaded the game and have begun chipping away at the first layer of the Curiosity cube. The number of players attempting to play the game has been so high that the game is experiencing server issues.

Molyneux has taken to Twitter to provide updates on the server issues:

"Thank goodness I am back in the office, there is total focus on fixing the issues," wrote Molyneux. "The problem is there is way way way more people tappin."

"I now understand what's going on, basically we and our server are overwhelmed by the number of people trying out the experiment," he tweeted just an hour later.

"Everyone please remember something as concurrent as this has never been attempted before," he pleaded in response to the complaints, "and we're just a tiny company."

Despite the issues, 22 Cans made the decisions to update the game while keeping it alive: "What makes this so scary, because we want to keep the cube active we are having to make changes on the server live. Praying to the gods" was Molyneux's last tweet before he retreated to silence.

At the time of this writing, Curiosity continues to experience temporary outages. Thus so far, despite the ridiculous number of people playing the game, the first layer still holds. According to the statistics provided in game (for a paltry sum of 100 in-game coins), 721,639 cubelets still remain on the first layer, 173,778 total players have played the game, and 99,892,513 cubelets have already been destroyed.

Will the first layer succumb to the efforts of its players within the first 24 hours? Rather, will the server issues plaguing the game allow it to happen?